Tallain

There's a roadmap.md on github showing MS's intentions for WPF -- first and foremost, porting to .Net Core. So there is, at least, active (and I'd say significant) development. But...

Not trying to sound facetious, but does WPF need any other significant work? It's a UI framework for Windows desktop apps (narrow and specific scope), it's stable and "just works", it's well-documented, it's officially supported, etc. Does there need to be anything else, or are we looking at it from the POV of more "modern" UI frameworks, where no active churn == languishing on the wayside?

I use this add-on and it's great. My overall tab count has only risen a very small amount since I adopted this tool and I feel like I actually "work through" the open tabs in a more timely manner. It helps to see something like "(4)" to denote Child Tabs, and to know I have a bunch of Stuff waiting for me to sort through.

> I see this in the art scene. It's like the art-piece isn't enough for people. They want an artist's statement. A philosophy. Who made it, why did they make it, where did they make it. Tell me the 20-chapter story of your heroic struggle from ugliness to beauty...

This is also becoming more common in the film scene. The Revenant is a recent and big example of the phenomenon. People liked to talk about the grueling filming process, how all the artists involved broke their backs to make this movie, and I think it seriously altered how the movie was perceived, changing a perfectly fine movie to something somehow transcendent.

Another, smaller, example is Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Some people made it a point that he learned to play the piano for the bits on screen.

It's as if the off-screen authenticity alters the on-screen authenticity. (Whether this is true or not is up for debate, and has been since method acting's inception, if not before.)

You make some good points about SQL's shortcomings but some of the claims you make are infactual or seem intentionally misleading. Since you mentioned SQL Server, I have to chime in with some corrections to your statements

While you can't declare new variables within a SELECT statement, you can modify them with functions:

  DECLARE @foo INT;

  SELECT
      @foo = dbo.ComputeSomething(...),
      @foo + @bar AS Val1
  FROM
      ...

Additionally, SQL Server does have a boolean type by another name: bit. It is 1/0/NULL and you can convert the string values TRUE and FALSE into their respective numerical values.

To modify your example to use proper SQL:

  DECLARE @x BIT;
  SELECT @x = 'TRUE' WHERE 1 <> 2

Or, to use a more real-world example, you'd probably use a CASE statement:

  SELECT
    @x = CASE WHEN 1 <> 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END

Yes, it's verbose. But it's possible. (SQL's slogan, probably, and understandably the root of a lot of your remarks.)

Finally, your GROUP BY / HAVING / WHERE example lacks an important distinction. HAVING <> WHERE. HAVING is specifically meant to deal with aggregate functions, while WHERE is a simple filter. You wouldn't use "HAVING PostId = @foo" any more than you might use "WHERE COUNT(*) > @bar". This is why it comes after the GROUP BY clause -- which you should think of as a "key" for the data that's being aggregated.

Look, SQL is not perfect or near perfect. As with any language, it could use improvements. But to criticize a language based on ignorance, misleading statements, or use cases that are not meant for the language is fairly dishonest, in my opinion.

You can also do `<div :if="foo">` where `foo` is a computed property (or function with ()) -- nothing specifies you have to write code inside the string, though it seems this is a pretty commonly overlooked ability.

I did, and realized that I'd spent all this time that was meant to be for writing on coding / finding cool tools / setting things up. Guilt overpowered the fun in this and I threw it all away and just installed Wordpress. I still play with the tech, but in a different time block, away from the writing itself.

Here's the thing: It's not better zoomed in. Insanely huge lettering isn't any better just because it's suddenly 85 characters wide on your screen, or whatever the goal these days is.

At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.

See also, also, this interesting but sometimes long-winded essay / review / examination of Seeing Like a State, and similar literature[0]. It's part of a series that goes through subjects like rationalism, narcissism, and tribal knowledge. Fair warning, it's almost the length of a novel!

https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

By default the keyboard shortcut is disabled in Mojave, and when turned on is actually Control+Option+Command+8.

Beautiful! Also, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for the link!

3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me nervous.

As an active phpBB and Invision user for years, I recall voting being only available with plugins, and they weren't typically considered upvotes or downvotes but reputation votes for the user. May sound like six of one / half-dozen of the other, but it was still a very different environment.

In addition, bumping was more of a way to get attention to something than to vote. As when asking for help on a specific topic, or to let other users know you edited and added to a thread's initial post.

It's a show about confronting your past, accepting loss, and growing past your old self.

I'm fascinated by the lukewarm response this show's received. It feels so refreshing to have a show a) tell you what it's going to do and then b) do it. It spends the first three episodes establishing the characters and the conceit, and then follows through on everything a narrative is supposed to follow through on.

Every major character has a "core trauma" that they must confront and move past. They ingest pills which put them into dreamlike states where they can fuse their trauma with mythological encounters, which lets them face their problems head on in a more abstract sense. Just about to the letter how Joseph Campbell explained the purpose of myths and legends.

Even the non-dreaming characters face larger-than-life scenarios they must overcome in order to overcome their own core problems. Without spoiling it, Dr. Mantleray (Justin Theroux) has a hilarious and way over the top problem that he confronts in an equally ridiculous manner.

Which reminds me of another facet of this show: it's not afraid to let you (or make you) laugh. Unlike Bojack's Flip McVicker, who says before his premier, "This show contains no intentional humor."

It's a tonic for people tired of Prestige TV. The "it gets good" syndrome, where we have to wait a whole season for any kind of "payoff" to hours of wheel-spinning, setup, and dissolution. I'm tired of mysterious characters doing weird things and waiting eight episodes to find out why. Plot is not a puzzle. I want to know the characters, to care about them, to know in clear terms what they want and watch them struggle to achieve that. Which, I think, Maniac delivers on.

I'll give them a look, thanks! It may not be free but it is cheaper than I expected. Looks nice.

Do you have any recommendations for a good alternative to Gmail? I've already made the switch away from Chrome, but for some reason my mind blanks on email -- I can only think of Yahoo or Hotmail

Have you heard of Scrivener? It's available for both OSX and PC, and I believe there's an iOS version, too. It's really wonderful. The organizational tools are just incredible, and are only as complicated and involved as you want them to be.